tide

tide is a simple, self-hostable video conference service that positions itself as an alternative to Jitsi, Zoom and Google Meet. Rather than renting conferencing from a hosted provider, an organisation can run tide on its own infrastructure and host meetings at an address such as meet.custom.domain. The product's own tagline describes it as "A Jitsi alternative that does a few things really well," and the site lists the core capabilities as link sharing, screen sharing and server-side recording. It is for anyone who wants to own the video meeting stack rather than depend on someone else's servers, and the site offers both a live demo and deployment documentation as starting points. Most video conferencing today happens on someone else's infrastructure. Zoom and Google Meet are hosted services: the meeting runs on the vendor's servers, under the vendor's terms, and the media travels through networks the customer does not control. Jitsi offers a self-hostable route, and tide explicitly frames itself as an alternative to it, naming Zoom and Google Meet alongside. The problem tide addresses is therefore one of ownership: whose server carries the audio and video, who holds the recordings, and who decides the sign-in rules. The website states its answer in two headline bullets — "Media stays on your server" and "Server-side recording" — arguing that a conferencing service can stay simple while still keeping the media and the resulting files inside the operator's own environment. For teams with data-residency expectations, internal security policies or a preference for self-reliance, that distinction weighs more heavily than a long feature list. Deployment is presented as one of tide's defining traits. The site lists "One Go binary" as its first bullet and calls tide a simple, self-hostable video conference service. Two links carry the practical next steps: a demo instance at demo.tide.convex.works and a Deploy link pointing to tide.convex.works/docs. The single-binary pitch means the whole service can be distributed and run as one artifact rather than as a suite of separate components the operator has to assemble and keep in sync. Go is the one technology named directly on the page, and the claim of one binary follows from that. For anyone evaluating self-hosted video, the effect is a smaller surface to install, fewer moving parts to update, and a documented entry point at the docs URL. On the meeting side, tide covers the core workflow of getting people into a call. Link sharing is named among the core features, and the interface shown on the site includes a "New room" form with fields for a Name, a Link, and a calendar shortcut. The illustrated example is a "Weekly sync" with the link meet.example.com/m/chw-pnih-sxi, and the form includes an "Add to calendar" action plus a Date block with Starts and Ends times — 10/05/2026, 07:30 PM to 08:00 PM in the example. Two actions are offered once the room is configured: "Create" and "Create & join," so an organiser can either prepare a room or start it immediately. Screen sharing is listed explicitly as a core feature, and recording is handled server-side rather than on a participant's machine — the site states "Server-side recording" both as a headline bullet and in the Product Hunt description alongside link sharing and screen sharing. Sign-in is delegated to OIDC, the fourth headline point. Using OIDC means authentication can be tied to an identity provider the organisation already operates, instead of tide maintaining its own account system, which fits the self-hosted positioning: the operator keeps control over who is allowed in. The meeting view shown on the site displays named participants — Daniel, Maya, Marcus and Nikos, marked as "You" — with a participant count of four, illustrating a small call. The overall approach tide takes is stated in its own tagline: "A Jitsi alternative that does a few things really well." Rather than competing on breadth, the product concentrates on a short, explicit list — one Go binary, media that stays on your server, server-side recording and OIDC sign-in — and repeats that framing in the Product Hunt description: "A few things, done well." The same description notes that tide lets you host your own "meet.custom.domain" for "a simple video conferencing environment with all core features you expect." The methodology, in other words, is to be a focused self-hosted service: install one binary, point a domain at it, and run meetings with link sharing, screen sharing and server-side recording under your own roof. The benefits that follow from the page's stated facts are straightforward. Because media stays on your server, meeting traffic terminates in infrastructure the operator controls. Because recording happens server-side, call recordings are produced by the service itself rather than depending on a participant capturing their own local stream. Because sign-in uses OIDC, access control can follow whatever identity system the organisation already runs instead of a separate set of credentials. Because the service is a single Go binary, deployment and maintenance are framed as simple rather than as an ongoing platform project. And because the scope is deliberately small — a few things done well — the operator does not have to weigh a long list of optional modules to get a working conferencing environment. Concrete scenarios appear on the page. The "New room" example is a recurring team meeting — a "Weekly sync" scheduled for a specific date and time with a fixed start and end — and the presence of an "Add to calendar" action indicates the intended flow of setting up a meeting and adding the appointment to a calendar. The generated link, meet.example.com/m/chw-pnih-sxi, shows the pattern of a short meeting URL that can be shared with attendees, which matches the link-sharing feature. The "Create" and "Create & join" buttons serve both the organiser who wants to prepare a room ahead of time and the one who wants to start straight away. The demo at demo.tide.convex.works provides a way to experience a call before committing to a deployment, and the site's framing of "meet.custom.domain" points to organisations that want their meetings hosted on a domain of their own. Server-side recording suits meetings that need to be captured for people who cannot attend, and OIDC sign-in suits invitations that must be restricted to members of an existing directory. The intended audience can be read from the page's own vocabulary: the three alternatives invoked — Jitsi, Zoom and Google Meet — describe both the self-hosting tradition tide belongs to and the mainstream services it is offered against. Anyone who wants to run their own "meet.custom.domain" is the stated target. In terms of stack, the site names exactly one technology, Go, in the bullet "One Go binary," and describes OIDC for sign-in. Deployment documentation is linked at tide.convex.works/docs. The page itself does not state a price, plan or licensing model, and it does not describe native mobile or desktop applications; it presents a self-hosted service with a room creation form and a shareable meeting link. Taken together, tide makes a single, deliberate claim: video conferencing that you host yourself, built around a few things done really well. One Go binary to deploy, media that stays on your server, server-side recording and OIDC sign-in, wrapped around the familiar flow of creating a room, sharing a link, sharing your screen and joining the call. For teams that want their meetings — and the recordings they produce — to remain on infrastructure they control, tide offers a focused alternative to Jitsi, Zoom and Google Meet.